


Staying With A Friend Tonight

by handschuhmaus



Series: Small Sith In The Kitchen [2]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Babysitting, Fluff, Gen, Master-Apprentice bonding, Riemann sums, Rule 63, Sith tattoos, Tenebrous not making her bed, ambitious cooking projects, arbitrary dietary restrictions of the Oz-inspired and pseudo-Pythagorian variety, fun with recreational mathematics, liberties taken with Muun mathematical precociousness, likely inconsistencies, little Hego is slightly mischievous, no Rugess does not know etymologies, not taking Sith seriously
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-07-21
Updated: 2014-07-21
Packaged: 2018-02-07 01:36:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,998
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1880043
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/handschuhmaus/pseuds/handschuhmaus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rugess Nome, renowned architect and secret Sith lord, is presently engaged in babysitting her prospective future apprentice, which entails finding ways to keep the mischievous young Muun occupied. Along the way, despite many irritations, she manages to find the kid endearing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Staying With A Friend Tonight

**Author's Note:**

> This story was in part inspired by the anecdote associated with the Occhi di Lupo recipe in Crescent Dragonwagon's _Passionate Vegetarian_ , which recipe I'm afraid I've not yet tried. And Tenebrous not making his/her bed is borrowed from a story on ff.net, which is in my bookmarks here on AO3.
> 
> The cooking will commence in chapter 2.

Rugess thought that Muuns must drink a different sort of tea or else surely Tema would have admonished his daughter's babysitter not to allow her the drink. What she said aloud was "Stop that, Hego!".

"Why?" the Muun inquired in the tone of five year olds everywhere. Then it seemed to occur to her that she could pass the blame. "If you'd made your bed, I wouldn't have been tempted to bounce on it," she accused, flopping onto her stomach and sending Rugess's pillow bouncing into the air as she landed with a loud springy noise.

"You should not have been tempted regardless," Rugess said, quite seriously. "The activity is quite juvenile."

Hego fixed her with a pointed stare, and it occured to the architect that what she had just said hardly applied to five-year-old Muuns. "Very well," Rugess allowed, letting her potential future apprentice make of that what she would.

"I'm not going to make it," Hego pronounced, getting up, although she did pause to straighten the pillow. "It's your bed."

"So it is," Nome agreed, for lack of a better response to the precocious girl. "Come along. I've got work to do."

"Okay," Hego said cheerfully, grasping the Bith's hand without being invited to. Still, Rugess caught the small elongated hand and gripped it fast; it would serve her purpose for Hego to keep at her side. As they made their way out of Rugess's bedroom and downstairs to her studio, she was slightly baffled, not to mention surprised, at Hego's stopping short and the feeling of a finger on her arm.

"What are you doing?" Rugess asked. The question was quite needless, given that she looked down as she said it to see Hego examining one of her tattoos, and indeed running a finger along the lines. Still, the Muun's answer would be telling.

"I think you have neat tattoos," Hego observed instead, avoiding the question. Directly thereafter, she pressed herself into the Bith's side, not a gesture Darth Tenebrous was altogether comfortable with. Furthermore, she was not sure what response would be appropriate for this comment, coming from a child and concerning arcane Sith symbols as it did. Ultimately she did not deign to reply and instead wordlessly tugged Hego along towards her studio.

Since the message light was blinking on her office comm, Rugess let Hego loose inside her studio and played the message. Her creased mouth tightened at Santhe's words, but it was really only a minor irritation. She would easily deliver the design in time, even if some unforeseen circumstance should result in her getting no progress in this week. Her reflection was interrupted by a loud banging and she turned, anger immediately rising, to see that her charge for the night had clamored up on the desk beside her drafting board and was kicking her heels against Rugess's prized pyrographed cabinets.

"Stop that!" she commanded, and the ire in her tone was sufficient to still Hego's legs after one final thump. "You may sit there," she directed, indicating a chair, "not on my desk." Sullenly, the small Muun obeyed. "I will--" she offered, in an effort to win over Hego, "put on some music, if you would like." Hego only shrugged.

The Bith put on one of her favorite pieces, though she very shortly began to wonder whether it wouldn't be to the tastes of small Muuns at all. She then turned on the drafting display and took up her stylus, displaying the ship design she was working on presently. Somehow without her noticing (she would have suspected Force use, only she would have detected that even more surely) Hego sneaked up behind her and jabbed a finger at the screen, managing to activate a rarely used control that re-rendered schematics in high contrast.

"What's that?" Hego inquired, sliding her finger towards a wing cross section. Strictly speaking, of course, wings were hardly necessary on space-going vessels, but they did affect handling in atmosphere, especially in the unenviable circumstance of losing certain ship functions. And they were aesthetically pleasing.

"It is the cross section of a ship's wing," Rugess explained simply.

"How do you know how big it is?" Hego asked, out of the blue. 

"What do you mean, how big it is?" Rugess inquired back. Truthfully, the question was not specific enough for her to know quite what the Muun actually wanted to know.

"Well," said Hego, "it's curved all funny like that, I imagine for aerodynam--you know what I mean, but so how would you tell how bit it is? Like, you could tell how big this glass--" she touched a straightforwardly cylindrical glass that sat on the desk, awaiting Rugess's nightly cleaning, "is, how much it would hold, or how much area it covers, with a formula, but how would you do that for the wing?" 

Rugess sighed and wasted a moment wondering whether the math would actually interested the small Muun at all when she was going to explain it now regardless. "Do you know about how the graph of a formula works?" she queried, trying to ascertain Hego's level of knowledge so she could tailor her explanation.

"Yes," Hego said proudly, "I'm working on that with my tutor, even though Mother doesn't wholly approve." This last was said in a tone of quiet confidence. Ah, yes, Caar Damask, consummate Muun in many ways, and rather unintentional Banking Clan official, which was not wholly a reflection of the utmost of her species. She had not intended to dare have children, intending for her late twin brother's half dozen offspring to inherit, but through Rugess's meddling via Tema, she had produced Hego, strong in the Force and named for her grandfather, who bore a name considered quite androgynous on Muunilinst. What Caar did not approve of was pure mathematics; even though this calculus had real world applications, except in statistical analysis where they'd as soon use a ready-made program on the computer, the Banking Clan Muuns would by and large scorn it as frivolous and unnecessary. 

"The curve of the wing can be modeled with a function, like so--" mentally decrying the interruption to her work, Rugess pulled up a sketching app that included a graphing program, "and once we have that function, the simplest way to begin approximating the area underneath it is to stick in a bunch of rectangles and begin evaluating and summating their area." Scrambling to gracefully find the right programmatic function that would allow her to place the rectangles, she demonstrated.

"Oh!" exclaimed Hego, eyes wide with amazement. "So, like this?" and she tried to make another rectangle by dragging apart with two fingers, but this was not the method for which the app was configured and instead somehow produced a confusing squiggle.

"Sort of, " Nome allowed, suppressing her reluctant joy in sharing this with an eager student. "You have to place the rectangles specifically so that you know their heights. 

"And-and if you use more, does it get more accurate?" Hego correctly and eagerly guessed.

"Indeed it does. It also, however, becomes increasingly tedious to evaluate. Would you like to try?"

The Muun nodded enthusiastically and took this as an invitation it wasn't to climb into the Bith's lap unbidden. It was not an experience Rugess had been particularly eager for, and yet, somehow, she found she sort of liked it despite herself. With the characteristic speed her people possessed at maths, Hego quickly performed the requisite multiplications and added together the resulting figures she'd recorded.

"The area under this curve is approximately 38 units," Hego pronounced.

Rapidly making mental estimate to check her math, Biths being slightly less speedy with simple figures than Muuns, Rugess said, "So it is. You can get even more accurate estimates by approximating the slant with trapezoids instead of rectangles. Do you know how to find the area of trapezoids?"

Hego thought for a moment, poking her tongue out of the corner of her mouth, before eagerly nodding again and moving to, with the stylus, turn the rectangles to trapezoids. Grimacing wryly, Rugess shifted to a more comfortable position, preparing for a prolonged session of instruction.

"It-it gets complicated after that, doesn't it?" Hego asked after a still moment had transpired from her summation of the trapezoid areas.

"Slightly so. Perhaps you are not ready for that just yet."

This once more required a moment's thought before Hego agreed. "Maybe there's something else we could--you could teach me, though?" she wheedled.

With her hand at the child's wrist, Rugess could faintly feel the tattoo of the Muun's three hearts beating, and somehow she knew with certainty that Hego would one day join the ranks of the Sith, as had been intended of her since conception. "How much do you know of infinity?" Rugess asked, though the topic had far more to do with the maths that currently intrigued Hego than with her future Sithhood.

They whiled away the next half hour in discussing infinitesimal numbers, and infinities and ensuring paradoxes, and even ventured into the concept of asymptotes, and, after Hego asked a random question, disparate numerical bases, decimal being dominate in the human populated areas of the galaxy, with binary and the related octal and hexadecimal being of secondary importance with computers based on them. But Rugess knew of places that used a septal base (indeed, some religious sects on Clakdor VII had made some use of it, inconvenient for conversion though it was) or duodecimal, and even some computers of exotic manufacture that worked in trinary.

That, alas, devolved into a series of questions about etymology regarding the names for the bases, none of which the Bith had answers for, and she did not intend just presently to bother scaring up information about them on the holonet. Then Hego alerted her, with a strangely wary boldness, "I'm getting hungry."

Rugess glanced at the clock - it would not be the dinner hour for some time yet, at least by her custom, and she did not actually have anything prepared. "Does that mean you insist on being fed within the next few minutes?" she asked, some sarcasm in her voice which she feared was lost entirely on the five year old.

Hego quirked her head in thought and patted the Bith's hand in an incongruously adult and incongruously conciliatory gesture. "Yes, it does," she pronounced seriously and then exclaimed, "Oh, Father sent along a snack, I just remembered, it's in my bag!"

"Oh," Rugess could not help saying. It occurred to her that she was hardly adept at dealing with children, but of course she said nothing about _that_ aloud.

"It's in the kitchen," Hego pointed out, in a tone that suggested the child thought Rugess was slow to catch on or follow her logic.

"Ah. I suppose you are tired of maths and believe we could put together some dinner if we went to the kitchen." Rugess declared, in a tone that brooked no disagreement.

Yet Hego looked at her keenly and saw this for what it was. "We certainly could. Father never encourages me to go near the kitchen. He says it is an unworthy occupation for a Muun."

Rugess, who as an outsider was not fully initiated into the intricacies of Muun society and dietary custom, still wryly wondered whether there were Muun chefs somewhere. Surely there were, perhaps among the lower classes, if the young Damask was anything to go by. What she said, however, was "It is not a necessary one, not for a Sith such as you shall be one day, but I admit, it can on occasion be a useful and entertaining skill." 

The child was looking at her strangely when she finished that statement, and responded, "I am going to be a Sith, am I?"

"Yes," Rugess resolved, increasingly certain of the fact for all the challenges Hego presented. "Come, let us go to my kitchen." Once more Hego walked beside her, grasping her hand.

**Author's Note:**

> Title borrowed from the Belle & Sebastian song "I'm a Cuckoo", but for no particular reason beyond the phrase being somewhat appropriate.
> 
> I know, I know I should be writing on the other little Hego in the kitchen story. It's quite unintentional that the female Hego takes more of a hands on role in the cooking project than did her male counterpart, and is really more of a reflection on the relative outlooks of Rugess Nome and Caar Damask. However, another distinction in behavior, that has her behaving more childishly, if precociously, here, is explained by a difference in age, with "Flours and Rage" Hego being probably more like eight or nine. (yeah and he's doing trig while Rugess is teaching her calculus here? ...well, I actually taught myself a good bit of calculus (albeit mostly the differential sort, though I did understand Riemann sums easily) from a book when I was... oh, twelve, but I was lacking in trigonometry beyond the very basics and so didn't understand that side of things, so... eh, basic calculus isn't actually necessarily beyond people who might not wholly grasp trig. ;) )


End file.
